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House Calls?

As I’ve researched ghosts and heard stories, one of the things I’ve learned is that some ghosts follow the patterns they established when they were alive. A jogger who has a heart attack on the park path and dies, might just show up on that same path in a month or so and keep jogging. A farmer who always went out to the barn to milk the cows every morning for the past forty years, might be drawn back to that same routine even after he’s passed away. Deceased priests show up in the hallways of churches. Departed teachers appear in the cloak rooms of schools. Ancient American Indians walk down the same trails they journeyed when they were alive.

Sometimes we stumble onto someone else’s path and we get to see the past relived. Just like the stories about Gettysburg, the past coming to life (for lack of a better word) before our eyes. I found this story and I thought it was a great example of patterns. And, it left me with a shiver down my spine. I hope it does the same for you.

Years ago, a gentleman was driving home from his night shift job at a nearby plant. The plant was about twenty miles from his home town, a small, pleasant town where everybody knew everybody else. As he drove down the road, he came up behind an older model car and he could see that a man was behind the wheel.

He peered at the car in the early morning fog, trying to figure out who was driving the car. He studied the man through the back window and then through the mirror on the side of the car, and he kept getting more concerned. He could swear the fellow driving looked just liked the old doctor in town. But the doctor had died two years earlier of a heart attack. Some in the town had said that he’d died of a broken heart because just months before his wife and son had died in a car accident.

Curious about the fellow driving, he decided to follow the car through town, rather than drive straight home. They both drove down the still quiet Main Street, passed the school and then, much to the surprise of the gentleman, the car turned off the main road and onto the road that the doctor had lived on.

“Was this a relative, come to visit, who hadn’t heard about the doctor’s death?”

He slowed his vehicle considerably when the car pulled into a driveway – the driveway of the house that had belong to the doctor. And when he glanced from the car to the house, he realized this was no relative visiting, because the doctor’s wife and son were standing on the front porch.